Helldivers 2 continues to see success in every benchmark you can find.
As reported by GameRant, PSN now shows that Helldivers 2 is now the most played game on PSN. That makes it more played at the moment than Fortnite or Call of Duty, and by that we mean all of them.
This matches up nicely with news we had reported earlier, that the title has reached a concurrent player peak of 409,367 players on Steam. It is speculated that there are more people who bought the game on Steam than PSN, but whatever case is true, it’s an unqualified success for Sony and Arrowhead Game Studios.
We do need to put Arrowhead Game Studios’ success with this title in some perspective. With the servers currently limited to serve only 450,000 players at a time, players are having to wait through queues to try the game out.
Furthermore, this is two weeks into Helldivers 2’s release. These factors do not mean there is anything misleading about Helldivers 2’s current success. Rather, what this is telling us is that not everyone who wants to play the game has given it a try and decided to return to become a long term player.
When Arrowhead Game Studios sorts out their server issues, and is capable of holding as many players on to go online as is needed, we may see a drop on those numbers. That would be because at that point, the people who did play the game just to give it a try, would have already given up on it and aren’t coming back.
Depending on how successfully Arrowhead Game Studios manages the content releases and expectations of their players, Helldivers 2 could realize its true potential as a popular ongoing live service game. Or, it could eventually turn out to be a failure to some degree, at the worst, because its success turned out to be unsustainable.
But if these weeks turn out to be the peak for Helldivers 2, it will still be a major achievement for Arrowhead. They will join a very small exclusive club of developers who transitioned their game from 2.5D small budget game, to a full 3D shooter. The other franchise to do that, of course, happens to be Fallout.
Now, a popular talking point arising about the title is that it’s gotten this success because it’s priced at $ 40. Subsequently, some argue that it isn’t just the lower price barrier, but the deliberate choice for lower production values that have made fans happy, because there are considerably lower stakes and expectations compared to other current AAA live service released, like Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League and Skull and Bones.
We put forward the hypothesis it’s received the unspoken and informal nod of approval of PlayStation fans for being one of their few first party releases this year. Whatever reason there is for its success, we genuinely hope Arrowhead Game Studios is able to sustain it to their and Sony’s satisfaction.
